Virtual/Fictitious Airline Callsigns

[Peter Grey]

Hello,

Over the past few months we've seen a marked increase in the presence of virtual airlines and other people using non real world air carrier callsigns.

In order to provide the best service to all of our pilots we ask that people who will be using "fictional" callsigns register them with us prior to use so that we can properly inform our controllers and prevent any conflicts.

In order to register your callsign please send the following information to ops@pilotedge.net:

Your airline name, verbal callsign, and three letter code you are requesting to use.

We will approve all requests that meet the following standards:

1. Are appropriate for the network
2. Are not used by a real world operator that operates within the United States.
3. Have not been already registered by another person

Note that your 3 letter code does NOT have to relate to your callsign in any way.

PilotEdge will not enforce who uses a callsign, we will not prevent others from using callsigns that you may have registered. The purpose of registration is to prevent confusion for our controllers, not to create "exclusive" callsigns.

A full list of real world callsigns are available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airline_codes if you want to check your callsign prior to submission.

Please post here if you have any questions.

[dave_paige]

Just curious, what about legacy airlines and their callsigns? If we would like to use them should we ask that they be 'registered' as well? Examples would be...

Pan American World Airways (Pan Am) PAA callsign "Clipper"
Trans World Airlines TWA callsign "TWA"
Eastern Airlines EAL callsign "Eastern"
America West Airlines AWE callsign "Cactus" before the merger with US Airways
US Air USA callsign "US Air" before changing name to US Airways and before the merger with American Airlines
Airtran TRS callsign "Citrus"
Pacific Southwest Airlines PSA callsign "PSA"

As far as I know, none of these are in use by any real world airline currently.

Dave

[Peter Grey]

It depends on the current real world status of the "legacy" callsign.

From your list:

PAA is currently assigned to the "new" Pan Am using the callsign "clipper", so no issue using that one.
TRS is still active as "citrus" so no issue there
TWA and EAL haven't been recycled so there is no real concern with those

PSA is now "Pacific Isle" which was a Vietnamese airline and later a US airline. This airline is now defunct. We could come up with something registration wise here if you intend to use this.

AWE and USA is a bit trickier

Officially USA isn't registered anymore and AWE is registered as Cactus. Note that post merger Combined USAir/America West used AWE - Cactus as their official callsign. The confusion tends to happen as most controllers know USA as what people file when they mean post merger AWE.

So we can add legacy TWA and EAL to the list the controllers will be using. I can do the same with USA as these days the post merger concern doesn't exist. I'm also not concerned with PSA as a callsign so I'll add that as well.

[dave_paige]

Thanks so much Peter,

I sometimes enjoy flying the legacy airlines as I'm an old guy that remembers those.

Dave

[501Aviator]

What about WheelsUP they have the callsign GammaJet? ICAO GAJ

[Peter Grey]

That one will be fine, just have someone from the VA send me an E-mail at the address in the first post.

We like to have an E-mail on file in case we ever have questions in the future.